


build me a city and call it jerusalem

by gabriel42069



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Home, Homecoming, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Reunions, Trauma, brief mentions of parental abuse, idk how to tag this but its reflections on how much terezi loves vriska and how shes her home, specifically vriskas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:23:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabriel42069/pseuds/gabriel42069
Summary: Trolls don't have the same concept of home as humans do, but you make your own and call it by her name.





	build me a city and call it jerusalem

Trolls don’t give the word  _ home  _ the same weight as humans do.

In the Alternian language, there is only one word for “home” and “house”, hive, which can be understood better as “living quarters”. The place you store your recuperacoon and the place your lusus stays. The place you return to at the end of the night. The place you will inevitably leave when you come of age.

Home is impermanent, and even worse, it is childish. Longing for home is for grubs and wigglers who miss their lusii, not for girls of six sweeps who never even had a lusus to miss.

You’re not exactly a textbook troll, though.

The destruction of your hive made you sad in a way you don’t think it affected the other trolls. They were nonchalant about leaving Alternia - the one who came closest to caring was Kanaya, but it was more about her lusus. You, however, had only really known your lusus for a handful of perigees, and had never so much as seen her face or felt her embrace or heard her words out loud, so you didn’t have an excuse for being so emotional.

It’s stupid, but your hive was home, in the human sense of the word. You tacked your shitty dayglo drawings on the walls, covered every surface with chalk doodles, stored your law books en masse and reread them until the spines were cracked and faded. There were dozens of scalemates hanging from your tree, and you learned to mimic the calls of the twitterbeasts outside, so that when you called, they would come and rest on a branch and accept your treats. You had folders full of gifs edited to look like your friends on your computer, each one bringing back a story and a laugh. You had everything in your hive, until all of a sudden -

You didn’t.

In your hive, you had a box that you kept in your closet under the rows of identical shirts and pants hanging down. It was filled with drawings you had taken down, clothes you had painstakingly sewn, and Magic 8 balls that you could no longer see into. It had a notebook with pages upon pages of writing and plans detailing your FLARP sessions, every disagreement between the two of you on what you should be called or how your costumes should be designed documented. The handwriting on some pages was different, where she grabbed the pencil and started writing herself because she wanted to get the idea down before it left her brain and you sat back and watched her and smiled.

When Alternia was destroyed, it was like all of those memories, all of that time with her before everything went to shit - they were gone. And you couldn’t get them back, because you couldn’t let yourself want them back. 

You had to answer every message she sent you with impassive aggression, ignore her attempts to bait you, ignore it when she talked about how she missed playing games with you. You spent a lot of time at your computer, face buried in your hands, the scars around your eyes aching with phantom pain.

You loved her, still, but you couldn’t let yourself. Your home was gone.

* * *

The metal of your cane is so cold it burns your hands.

You don’t want to do this. Your home was already destroyed once before, and you don’t want to do it again. You don’t want to kill the girl who defined your childhood, who introduced you to unconditional love, who has walked around with the weight of the world on her shoulders since she was hatched and never let anyone else do a damn thing to help her carry it. You aren’t ready.

She’s standing on the roof in front of you, facing you, and you would suspect that those are the tracks of dried cobalt tears on her cheeks if you weren’t trying desperately not to think about it. She cracks some joke and laughs, but it’s empty. You can tell that her nonchalance is feigned, that she does care, and you wish you could call her out on it. You wish you could tell her that you know that she’s in pain and you wish, more than anything, that you could help her with it.

But the timeline won’t accept that. She won’t let it accept that. If you coddle her, she will leave you empty again, having lost much more than your sight. You cannot kill her with kindness. She will leave to fight Jack Noir unless…

Unless she can’t leave. Unless she can’t fight.

It’s up to you, of course, because everything that revolves around her is up to you. 

You had always wanted to be a legislacerator, not a judge. The duties were not exactly well-defined, but you were not meant to be the one who assigned people their sentences. You simply presented the evidence, made your conviction, and left the defendant to His Honorable Tyranny to decide how to deal with them. When you played court in your block, you handed out sentences to the scalemates, acting the part of the Tyranny because the chalk on your wall could not speak for himself. But even when you watched your scalemates dangle, you knew that you could climb out of the window and untie them any time you wanted. Your sentences were never permanent. 

Besides. Your scalemates weren’t alive, and as soft as they were to hug, you did not love them the way you loved Vriska. The way you still love her, even as her eyes are cold and frightened and she stands away from you, the brick walls you spent so long helping her tear down up again and keeping you out. You have never pronounced a living person guilty. You have aided in murders before, and you have done terrible things, but you have never killed anyone. You do not want to start now.

You wish that you weren’t a Seer of Mind. You wish paradox space had assigned you a different role. The future is cold, and hard, and it does not care about you, and rather than rearranging it to your will you’re the one who has to bow to its whims. You can only See what will happen. You can’t change it.

* * *

Vriska is unconscious with her head in your lap, and you cautiously touch the curve of her jaw and realize that you were wrong. 

Usually, this realization would be unpleasant, but she looks peaceful even with the bruise on her cheek that you do not care. Her eyes are closed and she breathes slowly in-and-out, safe and alive. 

You were wrong on two counts.

The first: your home is not gone. Your home is still here, steady in your arms with every breath she takes. Alternia being destroyed was a tragedy, but it was also a gift. You were not a good troll, you know that. Any other troll would not have hesitated when they had a sharp point held to the back of their enemy. Any other troll would not have let sentiment outweigh bloodlust, but you suppose you never had all that much bloodlust in the first place.

Alternia being destroyed set the girl asleep on your lap free. You did not understand for a while how she could care so little about the twice-over loss of her lusus, but then you remembered how often Vriska had stayed too long at your hive, staying the day and risking the nightmares by sleeping soporless on your floor. You remembered when she had sent you home with a tight hug after FLARP sessions and didn’t message you for nearly a day afterwards, answering in tight one-word sentences. You remembered how she joked about the hunger of her lusus, but underneath, it was eating her alive. You remembered how even the largest rock could be worn down to a pebble under the force of a waterfall.

You’re glad that Vriska got out before there was nothing left in the way of the water.

You’re glad that your home is right here, and your home is wherever she is, and you were a fool to think otherwise, because what mattered to you about your hive was less that it was your home and more that you had made thousands of memories with her there and you didn’t want to lose the reminders of what you’d had. The years you spent together.

But, as you stroke your thumb over Vriska’s cheek and watch her stir slightly, you don’t care as much about them anymore, because you don’t need them to remember her. You can always make more memories.

The second count that you were wrong on was thinking that you could not change the course of fate.

Your life is tinged by irony and incoherence. You are a member of a violent species who cannot bring herself to kill anyone. Your blood is in between low and high, denoting nothing in particular except that you are likely to spend the rest of your life in a courtroom with a monster trying to get people killed. You are a Seer who cannot see.

You may as well break another rule while you’re at it. 

Paradox space was idiotic to think that it could keep you and Vriska apart. You have always been drawn to each other, fated for each other before you had any idea of what that would mean. Death and certitude and finality couldn’t stop you. They never will.

Vriska opens her eyes and looks into yours, her face sleepy and confused. She reaches up and pokes your cheek, presumably to see if you’re real, and it makes you laugh. She smiles.

You love her. You’re never going to let her go again.

* * *

She kisses you after a month or so on the meteor. It is quick as a flash and she steps away so fast afterwards that you are not sure if it happened, but you take her hand and smile at her. You can smell the blush on her cheeks and feel the matching heat on yours, but you don’t mind.

It keeps happening, and you keep not labelling it. You’re tired of troll culture. You were never good at being a troll, especially where Vriska was concerned. 

You ask Lalonde to explain human relationships to you, and she gives you a knowing smile but agrees and forces you to watch hours of garbage human television programming to teach you about it. After a fortnight of that torture, you ask Vriska to be your girlfriend.

She accepts.

You are part moirails, part matesprits, and a strange part kismeses, but even more than that you are hers. You lay your head on her shoulder and she idly brushes your hair back and kisses your forehead. You find her crying in a hallway and you gently lick her tears away and lead her off to bed. You bicker and quarrell but rarely get angry, and she always makes you want to be better. She makes you want to be the troll she thinks you are, and somehow you end up being her. 

When the clown makes his advances, you feel more terrified than you felt when facing down the monstrous king on the Battlefield, more terrified than you have ever been in your life. Your pusher thumps in your chest but then you hear a throat clear and you look down and see Vriska, kneeling behind him with a grin. She gives you a thumbs up, and without thinking you shove your hands out and push him over. He falls over Vriska’s back and onto the floor. You help Vriska up and she slings an arm around your shoulder, leaning over to kiss your ear as you walk away together.

The thing is that she takes care of you, and you take care of her. She puts bandaids on your cuts and you make her Rose’s human soups when she gets sick. You sit together and make plans again, fill up more notebooks and pin more drawings to the walls and scheme constantly. She tells you about how she’s going to kill the demon and you point out the flaws in her ideas and help her come up with new ones. You watch movies and read books and play games together.

You tell her you love her after a human year has passed, and she goes blue and starts to cry. You hold her as she does, your pusher clenching, but when her tears have dried she sits up, kisses you, and tells you she loves you. “No one has ever loved me before,” she whispers later, and you vow to love her just a little bit more the next day.

The thing is that you would do anything for her, and she’s your other half, your favorite person, and your best friend. The humans teach you the difference between hatefriend-that-means-friend and hatefriend-that-means-enemy, and even though Alternian doesn’t have the words to explain it, you look at Vriska and it makes sense to you.

The thing is, to put it simply, that you never want to go without her again.

* * *

You stand on the platform and your fists clench involuntarily. You really wish paradox space was something tangible so that you could hit it right about now. How  _ dare  _ the Incipisphere do this to you.

You thought you had reached an understanding. The world had gone almost a sweep and a half without trying to take your girlfriend away from you, and you thought that meant that you would finally be allowed some peace. You would get your happy ending, and you would get your home again, but permanently this time, and you would have won the game.

But no matter how long you spend staring at the far-off sky, she does not materialize from it, flying victoriously in with her wings and sweeping you off your feet, right in the nick of time before you enter the new universe. Your life predictably fails to be the fairy tale you sometimes wish it was, and the sky remains empty.

Life in the new universe is neither good nor bad. You spend your days with your friends, and you get to talk to the new humans, which you guess you enjoy. They aren’t bad people, and you think you would like them if you could focus on a conversation with them instead of staring at the sky.

You talk to Rose and Kanaya the most out of anyone, and although they do not know what you’re feeling they come the closest to understanding. Kanaya gives you warm hugs and Rose listens to what you tell her, but even they can’t make up for her absence.

If you wanted to live without her, you know you could. You could pick yourself up and brush yourself off and put the memories of her in the past, where they would be safe and secure and they couldn’t hurt you. You could live without her and you would be okay. You could make a future for yourself on this planet, alone, and you could be happy with it.

But you don’t  _ want  _ to do that.

You want her back. You want to bring her here, to show her everything on this planet, to lead her around with her hand in yours and learn this place through her eyes. You want to talk with other people with her, see how she reacts to them and watch her make friends, watch her become even more loved and appreciated. You want her to be happy. You want to be happy with her.

So one day, you dig your jetpack out from your sylladex, say goodbye to your friends, and set out in search of the girl you love.

* * *

The Furthest Ring is cold.

Your jetpack spews flames on your back, but they lost their heat hours ago. You think if you held your hand to the fire it would only feel cool to you. Your hands are numb, your feet are numb, every inch of your skin is numb. Tears well up in your eyes and are whipped away by the wind as you travel through the void. It is cold, and miserable, and you would not turn back and head home for anything in the world.

Not until you have her, that is.

You caught the scent a while ago. A gold trail of light, spiraling through the emptiness. You don’t think she’s been there, but it was left behind her nonetheless. A future trail rather than a past trail, an imprint of what you hope will be there. You desperately hope.

You clutch the straps of your jetpack tight and continue following the path. 

Noise swirls and eddies around you. The sharp neon scent of screaming and the ghostly white smell of wind whirling, unnatural in the depths of the Incipisphere, are the soundtrack to your journey. If you stopped and sniffed for a while, you could piece together what’s happening and get a sense for where the screaming is coming from and why it never seems to end. But you can’t afford that. If there’s screaming, there’s danger, and when there’s danger, Vriska is at the center of it.

Foolhardy and courageous, that girl of yours.

* * *

The gold smell in the air intensifies.

The trail of light is wrapped around you now, and you feel it on every inch of your skin, you can smell it all around you, you can feel how close you are now. Every sense of yours is tingling, awake and alive and ready. So ready. At the end of the trail is a brightness, an explosion of light scarring the Outer Ring, and you know that you will find her there.

You hope.

You really, really hope.

As you get closer to the end of the line, you start hearing noises. 

They almost sound like voices, and they almost sound familiar, but you remind yourself that you’re too far away to tell, that you can’t make assumptions unless you want to have your hopes dashed. 

Before she left, you didn’t let her say goodbye. You were sitting next to her for hours, her thigh pressed against yours, and she occasionally took your hand in hers and fidgeted with it while she talked, the intimacy between you two as easy and natural as breathing, as being alive. She traced patterns, drew her symbol on your palm over and over again, tapped out drum beats on the side of your hand. She was alive and solid and warm, filled with laughter and courage and love for you.

When she tried to say goodbye, tried to pull you in for a hug, you laughed and squeezed her hand. You told her you refused to say goodbye. You had rebooted the universe to get her back, and you weren’t about to say goodbye to her again. 

If that was your last goodbye, you don’t know what you’d do. If you never got to see her again…

If you let her leave without telling her how much you loved her one last time, without kissing her, without feeling the scars on the side of her face and pressing kisses to every inch of skin, without letting her know exactly how much you adore her and how she is the world to you, the sun and moons and every star in your sky… if you let her leave like that, and she never came back to you, you couldn’t forgive yourself. 

You hear voices again, louder this time. You raise your head and take a deep breath, and -

Blueberries.

The smell of blueberries and black licorice hits your nose, sharp and bright and  _ beautiful _ .

A second later, she barrels into you, her arms sweeping you up and holding you tight. She presses you as close to her as possible, and you feel tears stinging your eyes as you wrap your arms around her and hold her tight in return. She strokes a hand over your hair and makes soft, comforting shushing noises as you cry. You missed her, you were so worried about her, you love her.

You pull back and her hands fall to your waist, still holding tight. You raise your hand and she leans her face into it. You trace your fingers across her face. The ragged scar tissue makes hills and valleys out of her flesh, your fingers feeling grey and blue and white, a tragedy written across her pores. You touch her nose, her lips, her eyelids, poke at the sharp tips of her fangs, twist strands of her hair in your fingers, map every inch of her face until you are sure that she is real, she is here, she is yours.

“Hey,” she whispers into your ear, a secret between the two of you like thousands exchanged before, her voice gravelly and tired, “Missed you.”

Clinging to her with everything in you, you let out a small laugh. “Understatement of the century,” you mumble back. You lean in and kiss her scarred cheek. “What happened?”

She squeezes your hip. “Well…” she hesitates. “It’s… hard to explain, I guess? I, uh, had the juju, and this giant house fell down behind me, and these… things that I didn’t really recognize came out, like sprites almost, and they surrounded him and then the angel Calliope did her thing and he disappeared along with the green sun and now he’s… gone. All of him.”

You pull her close again and rest your forehead on the curve of her shoulder. “I’m glad,” you tell her. “I’m so fucking glad. You shit. You can’t do things like that. You’re going to make my pusher explode and then I’m going to die.”

She laughs, slightly wheezy. “Aw, I’m sorry, Pyrope.” She presses a kiss to your head. “Sorry that you’re such a weenie.”

You laugh and squeeze her in your arms, feeling the solid, comforting weight of her. She’s real. She’s not a mirage, an oasis in an empty desert, a hallucination. She’s real, and she’s alive, and she’s in your arms, and you’re free.

Someone clears their throat behind you. You turn to see Aradia, hovering with wings flapping and a bright smile. You untangle yourself from Vriska and pull her in for a hug. She pats your back and taps your nose with a finger when she pulls away. “We don’t have a lot of time left here,” she says with a laugh. “You and Vriska can embrace as much as you need once we’re all back home, okay?”

It takes you a second to process that, because you  _ are  _ home. The girl you love takes your hand, and you look at her and smile, and you’re finally home.


End file.
